January 2015

The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum is overseeing the 4th and latest restoration of the original Enterprise model used to film The Original Series. For one day only they let the public in on the process, and TrekMovie’s Jared Whitley has the scoop and photos below.

The epic crossover tale, The Primate Directive, comes to a shocking conclusion and the Five-Year Mission of the Enterprise continues in April 2015 with a little help from IDW Publishing. Details after the break.

It was just confirmed by Deadline that Simon Pegg (JJ Trek’s Scotty) and Doug Jung (creator of the TNT series Dark Blue) will co-write the script for the next Star Trek film. This comes on the heals of the exit of Bob Orci and the announcement that Justin Lin (Fast and Furious 6) will take on the director’s chair for the third film in the new franchise.

You there! Humans! IDW Publishing and BOOM! Studios will release the second issue of Star Trek/Planet of the Apes: The Primate Directive this week. TrekMovie reviews and previews this installment of the crossover story nobody ever expected! Spoilers and more exclamation points after the break!

After three critically acclaimed episodes (and one more just in the can), the award-winning webseries, Star Trek Continues, today launched their second Kickstarter, dubbed “Kirkstarter 2.0”, to help fund two (or maybe more) new episodes and possibly build some new sets if stretch goals are reached. After only 12 hours, they’ve already raised over $40K, well on their way to their $100K goal.

Two fearless climbers have captured the eyes of the world this week with their amazing ascent up Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan. After climbing for 18 days and nights, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson today became the first climbers ever to use only their hands and feet to summit a 3,000-foot sheer path called the Dawn Wall. The climb has garnered incredible amounts of media attention. El Capitan is of course known to Trek fans, who saw Captain Kirk free climb it in Star Trek V.

Star Trek: The Webcomic, written and illustrated by Mark Farinas, is an ongoing comic strip published online, with compelling and entertaining Star Trek tales based on original series concepts. TrekMovie looks at the strip and learns more from its creator after the break.

The “gambit” is revealed as Kirk, Sisko, and Q face off against the power-mad Gul Dukat in the last issue of IDW’s Star Trek Ongoing: The Q Gambit. Does the final nu-24th century showdown deliver the goods? Find out with a spoiler-filled review, plus a 7 page preview, after the jump.

The following essay comes to us from Lukas Kendall at Film Score Monthly (www.filmscoremonthly.com), whose Star Trek credentials including producing or co-producing most of the recent collector’s edition soundtrack CDs like the 15-disc La-La Land Records TOS box set. He also assisted with the recent publication of Return to Tomorrow, the oral history of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Lukas says he’s a lifelong Trekker who follows the ongoing dialogue about the franchise, and thought he had something to add about its fundamental appeal—and, among other things, the reason why J.J. Trek is so polarizing.

After an interplanetary episode of The Simpsons last night, the show ended with some rather familiar closing credits played to the Star Trek The Original Series closing theme. Check out the video after the jump, and see how many references you can name!

With the release of Season 7 we come to the end of rediscovering The Next Generation in high definition. It has been an amazing two years of releases from the CBS Digital team, lifting the veil of edited on videotape standard definition haze. So this release is bittersweet, a new season to go through is always welcome, but knowing this is the last remastered Trek show for the foreseeable future is saddening. Read on for the full review.